The ghost in the labIn a new book, developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan offers his take on the biggest challengesfacing psychological research — and outlines a few “modest suggestions” to address them.

BY LEA WINERMAN

Monitor staff

In his half-century career, Jerome Kagan, PhD, became one of the
world’s pre-eminent researchers in
developmental psychology, best known
for his studies finding that some
aspects of our temperament — such
as anxiety and shyness — are inborn,
appearing as early as infancy and
staying with us throughout our lives.

Never one to shy away from
controversy, Kagan lays out in his new
book of essays, “Psychology’s Ghosts:
The Crisis in the Profession and the
Way Back,” what he sees as the major
problems facing psychological research
— problems he says hold psychology
back from making the kinds of grand
discoveries possible in other scientific
fields such as biology and physics.

Kagan spoke to the Monitor abouthis vision for making psychologyresearch more productive.

What are “Psychology’sGhosts?”“Ghosts” refer to many of the[unfounded] assumptions thatpsychologists make as they conducttheir research.

For example, there are many studiesin which a team of psychologists usesone procedure in one setting, gets aresult and assumes that that resultwould hold no matter where youdid the study, no matter what theprocedure was and no matter what thepopulation was. That strategy temptsthe investigator to assume that theconcept inferred from the data appliesbroadly.

Another ghost is our approach
to research on mental illness. The
DSM categories for mental illness are
the only disease categories in all of
medicine that do not take etiology or
cause into account. In psychiatry, we
have disease categories based only on
symptoms. That would never occur in
cancer or cardiology or immunology,
where you always diagnose on the basis
of both the symptoms and the cause.

So what that means is that everycategory today in the DSM-IV, and inthe DSM-V, which will be publishednext year, has a heterogeneous etiology.

So the only way to make progress isto collect other psychological andbiological evidence, not just reports ofsymptoms.

If we did that for a category like
major depressive disorder, we’d see that
it’s actually — I’m going to make up
a number here — maybe six different
diseases with six different causes.

So what’s holding us backfrom developing these kindsof multiple categories in theDSM, based on genetic or othercauses?

We don’t know enough. But then thecommittee preparing the DSM and thepsychiatrists and psychologists who useit should be sensitive to that. That is tosay, a psychologist or psychiatrist treatinga depressed person should be sensitiveto the possible cause and try to discernit, by gathering psychological data, byrequesting biological data, so that he orshe can provide better treatment. But fewclinicians are doing that.

Let’s talk about treatment. In
another essay in the book, you
argue that cognitive behavioral
therapy may be on the verge of
losing its effectiveness. Why is
that?

A new therapy usually is effective
because it’s new, and the patient and the
doctor think it’s very effective. It usually
takes about 50 years for a therapeutic
ritual to lose its effectiveness. For
example, psychoanalysis was very
effective for about 50 years, and then the
therapists lost faith in it, and therefore it
stopped working.

The recent reviews of cognitive
behavioral therapy, which is 50 years
old, are beginning to show the same
thing. Because it is not the specific ritual
that matters, it is “does the therapist
have faith in this ritual, whether it’s
valid or not,” and does the therapist
communicate that faith to the patient?

A wonderful example is that, under
Mao Zedong, psychoanalysis never
took hold in China. Now that China
is growing more capitalist, suddenly
psychoanalytic theory is new there.